“You don’t have to immediately eliminate world poverty, bring world peace, or save the environment. You just have to do whatever you discover works with you modest resources to make a difference in the lives of poor people” – William Easterly The White Man’s Burden

I am really sorry again for how long it’s been since I have written to you here. I would really like to blame my circumstances; I live in Africa so I have no access to the Internet, or something along those lines. The truth of the matter is that most weekends I go to Lobatse, a town about two hours from my village, where I get to sit by a pool, order filtered coffee (a rarity in Botswana), and spend as much time as I want surfing the Interweb. The problem is that I tend to binge on the coffee, become overwhelmed by caffeine, Facebook, Gmail, and the New York Times that I need to take a pool break, and then forget to come back to this. So what I’m say is, sorry that I’m lazy.

These past weeks have been especially long, hard and often frustrating. Botswana schools have been on break since November, 26th, so for the last month and more I’ve had no real job and nothing specific to do each day. This might seem nice, a long vacation right? Wrong. Having nothing at all to do makes me feel pointless, adding to this was spending the holidays in Africa. So many times I asked myself, what am I doing here? Nothing. Why am I putting myself through the pain of missing my family for nothing? No good answer for this. Luckily I have great Peace Corps friends and we got together to make the holidays the best week could, there were tears but also a lot of caroling, eating, and merry-making.

I reached a make or break point one morning a week before Christmas, I had been hiding in my house all morning, wallowing in a bit of self-pity, when a little (evil, hateful) voice in my head (that’s not that weird I swear) asked me a question: You ridicule Batswana all the time for being slow, lazy and unmotivated, aren’t you kinda doing the same thing? Is there really nothing you could do to help anyone or is it easier to stay inside watching movies and baking bread?

In fact that voice sounded a lot like Mom when she’s playing the Devil’s Advocate in an argument, and you get super pissed cause you know she’s just a little bit (or a whole lotta bit) right. In this case that voice was spot on, I had been ignoring this little fact for a week at least.

So I laced up my shoes, pulled on my sunhat and walked through the sand to the clinic to see what could be done. The sun scorched my head, children ran to their fences to point at me and screamed “lekgoa, lekgoa, lekgoa” (that’s all they do, point and scream over and over), my shoes filled with hot sand, basically it was the worst. When I got to the clinic the had nurse scolded me for not coming before now, I ignored this and asked where I could help. She asked if I knew how to read a scale and draw graphs, I said, “yeah, maybe, I dunno, I guess so”. She sent me to the Child Welfare Clinic where all the children in the village from 1 month – 5 years old come once a month to be weighed and measured, then the family receives their food rations: cooking oil, bread, dried beans, and fortified bran porridge. So this is what I have been doing for the past three weeks, weighing babies, ya know what? It fuckin rules. The babies are really cute when we put them in the scale (it’s similar to a baby swing), I feel like I’m really doing good when I track their growth & nutrition, then I get to do my favorite thing: giving that mother, who has no money at all, food for her family.

Dear Meredyth,Remember the other night when we spoke on the phone and you told me about your trials and errors baking bread? We talked about how bread can be so difficult, the slightest miscalculation of an ingredient, rising time, room temperature or mishandling the dough can ruin your work completely. I remember writing a blog post so long ago about my love/hate relationship with baking bread, my first efforts always end with me throw the dry, crumbling mess of dough out the window, but the second or third try ends perfectly so by then I forget how much stress and anger I felt earlier. In Botswana some sort of bread is baked at home a few times a week. Some days it’s a sandwich type of loaf, but also biscuits, rolls, “fat cakes” (fried dough), flat breads and dumplings are baked through the week. Bread baking is not for elite bakers, or wannabes like myself, every woman in the household bakes. Baking, like cooking, is an enjoyable exercise, never stressful or angering. Also, the Batswana never use a measuring cup, spoon, timer or a recipe, they just do it.Recipe~3 cups wheat flour &~ 1 cup all purpose flour1 packet of yeast2 tsps salt1/3 cup brown sugar (optional)~1 cup warm water~1/2 cup whole milk~2 tbsps butter (soft!)First combine all the dry ingredients, including the yeast into a large bowl, mix it well with your hands.Make a pit in the middle of the dry ingredients, pour in the milk and start mixing it with your hands.Cut in the butter.Add the warm water 1/3 cup at time, folding the dough until more water is needed. You may have to add a little more warm water (or instead of water), you want the dough to be sticky but not too sticky.Keep kneading the dough until it looks like what bread dough should look like.Pinch off about a baseball size piece of dough with your hands and form balls. Feel free to roll the balls in oats, nuts or sprinkle some spices on top (butter the tops just a bit).Bake on a greased or non stick sheet @ 350 until they’re golden on top.Boom, bread balls.

Past Posts This Month

Past Posts This Month

Who We Are

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found;
Now proud as an enjoyer and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure,
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure;
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight,
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.